


Solder

by Arazsya



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Amnesia, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-01
Updated: 2018-07-01
Packaged: 2019-05-31 14:08:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15121085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arazsya/pseuds/Arazsya
Summary: Mick Rory's looking for a painting and a massacre. He finds a man with no memories.





	Solder

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wavingatomicnumbers](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=wavingatomicnumbers).



> For tumblr user @wavingatomicnumbers - I hope you like it! 
> 
> Many thanks to flammenkobold for read-throughs and just sort of being generally wonderful.

Mick has never been able to work out why people place so much value on things that are so easily burned. He doesn’t know why the painting is worth anything to anyone, why Snart had wanted to steal it in the first place, or, on some level, why he has just killed a man to get to it.

He doesn’t care about it. It’s a load of colour splurged onto a canvas in a fancy wooden frame. It means nothing to him, not from what it is. Maybe he’s just not smart enough. Students probably write essays about it. Snart would have had a few choice lines for it, smart and loaded with wordplay, the way his words usually were. But he wasn’t going to get an opportunity to use them now, and even if Mick had known where to start composing one, he has no one to tell it to. Not unless he goes back downstairs to talk to the corpse.

He can follow the cause and effect of it back some of the way, he supposes, just as he can hold a lighter to the edge of the painting and watch as the flames catch, dancing and golden and finally turning it beautiful in his eyes.

The painting was the last heist that Snart had planned. Mick had wanted to prove to himself that he would get by just fine without his partner, without anyone. And then someone else had got to the painting first, and that had been taken away from him. He hadn’t been in the mood to take prisoners. That's why one of them’s dead. Why more of them should have been dead, but he had only been able to get to the one in time, and he had already been running. Must have taken a wrong turn, somewhere in the confusion and the sudden darkness, and come sprinting down the corridor towards Mick. He’d nearly cannoned straight into him, tried to abort at the last second, but by then he had been within Mick’s reach.

That was how he had died, but not why, not really. _Why_ goes back further, to why Snart had wanted the painting - money, it was worth money, but not anymore, because the canvas shrivels in the heat, oils curling, because Mick doesn’t care - to why the painting had ever been worth anything to anyone, what it was that made it different from the kids’ drawings people stick to their fridges.

He waits until it has burnt itself out, blackened and unrecognisable, until he has grown so used to the sharp smell of it that he can’t sense it anymore. Then he stops trying to understand, and returns to hunting down everyone who had had the misfortune to be standing between him and the disaster he needed to wreak.

None of them have come back yet. Won’t, shouldn’t, not if they’re thinking only of their own skins, but Mick knows they will, some for following orders, some for the principle of it, and some just for the money. There’s a lot of that sunk into this place. Not in the infrastructure - if there’s paint, it’s peeling, if there’s wood, it’s worm-riddled, and if there’s glass, it’s broken. The only parts that are well-maintained are the doors, the walls, and the locks. The money’s in the items, waiting for their buyers, most of them packed carefully into crates and stacked in the rooms. The painting hadn’t been, yet. As he stalks through the hallways, glancing into the rooms as he passes them, he can see other things that haven’t been stored - a hunk of carved rock, a great snarl of wires and metal that he assumes is some sort of modern art installation, and some kind of musical instrument that would probably need its own custom crate.

They must have been fairly confident that the CCPD weren’t about to track them down, an odd assumption given how easily Mick had found them - maybe they have some sort of arrangement, in which case Mick shouldn’t stay too long. He’ll pick up a few things, he decides, partly because maybe they’ll come after him, and partly because as much as the painting had been a gesture, he still needs to eat.

Most of it’s not as valuable as he had hoped. He finds a few fake diamonds in one of the drawers that any fence worth their salt would have laughed at, probably just an afterthought to a larger theft by someone that had liked their sparkle. Snart would have said it was sloppy. Snart isn’t there.

Mick shifts them around his hand like they’re dice he’s about to roll, and is considering taking them himself as a final insult to his old partner’s presence (he won’t leave, why won’t he leave him alone) when he hears it. A clatter, the sound of something metal impacting the floor.

His gun is in his hand less than a heartbeat later, and he moves slowly out into the corridor. He wants to rush, to stride straight towards the source and tear it down, but he doesn’t have backup anymore. Has to be smarter if he wants to make it. The corpse of the man he had killed still lies where he left it, the face caught somewhere between fear and surprise. Mick steps over it. Pauses as the clatter comes again, this time accompanied by a muffled noise that might have been speech.

It's coming from behind one of the doors he'd skipped past initially, the one with the modern art installation. He hadn't given it more than a cursory glance then - the door had been locked when he'd tried it, and there hadn't been any sign of movement from within.

It gives easily enough when he kicks it in, the door whipping open so hard that anyone waiting behind it would have had their skull caved in. As it is, there's no one, and it just crashes into the wall violently enough that the room shakes, the art installation letting out a whirring hiss of protest.

The man inside starts, scrambling sideways and away from the door, movements so frantic that he nearly sends himself crashing back down. He had been sitting at the base of the art monstrosity, amongst a scattering of machine parts, not quite visible from the corridor.

Mick steps inside, and the man backs away, his feet catching on loose screws that nearly topple him. He holds up his hands between them, placating, the left one bruised and crooked, trails of blood vanishing up into a tattered sleeve. He'd be taller than Mick, if he straightened, but he doesn't, and the wideness of his eyes makes him look much smaller.

"Who are you?" he asks, the words cut through by a flinch as his shoulders hit the opposite wall. "Are you a new one?"

There's even more bruising on his face, yellows and blacks and blues around his neck, tracing down under his collar. Smears of blood, matting in his hair. The hands he's holding out like they'd be any protection at all are trembling. He's clearly not someone who wants to be there. Not one of the thieves. Mick has no quarrel with him.

"I told you," the man says. Pleads. Mick reads the story of what's been done to him off his skin, notes the expensive watch with the shattered face, the perfect teeth behind the split lips; he's just another thing they've stolen. "I don't remember anything. I don't know how to do what you want me to do."

"You don't remember," Mick echoes, slowly, bits of a plan starting to clot together in his head. This man's clearly worth money and trouble; the thieves are more likely to come after him, and this thing they've been trying to get him to do, than the fake diamonds.

"Nothing," the man says, shakes his head so wildly that it must have burst new pain into his skull, because he sways for a second, blinking. "You know I don't, your friends had to tell me my name. I can't do this. I have to get to a hospital."

It's a good plan, Mick thinks. Snart would have been proud of him, or, at least, he would have been once, before he'd taken up morals and followed that path all the way to Iron Heights.

"You don't remember me?" he asks, and tries to inject concern into the words. It must work, just a little, because when he moves towards the man again, he doesn't cringe away.

"Should I?" the man squints at him like he really is trying, only for his gaze to slide off sideways as Mick gets too close.

"Mick," Mick says, and this is where the man would challenge him, if he really was lying, but there's not even a cloud of suspicion on his face. "I'm your bodyguard."

"Oh," the man says, and his shoulders sag as he breathes. "Sorry, I don't remember, I don't really know what happened. I think one of them must have hit me, and then-"

"Guess I'm not doing the best job," Mick growls, reaching out to grip the tattered remnants of the man's jacket, then letting his hand drop when he sees him tense again.

"What?" There's a horror in the words, like suggesting Mick's not good at the job he doesn't have would be unforgivable. "No, I mean, you've come to rescue me, haven't you?"

"Yeah," Mick says, and steps back, lets the man move forward on his own. "They ran, we should get out of here before they come back."

The man makes it about half a metre before he stops dead, stares at Mick like he's an oasis in a desert.

"Does this mean you can tell me who I am?" he says, and his voice is rasping, barely above a whisper. "They told me my name but everything else is gone."

"You should remember on your own," Mick tells him, turns his back to walk towards the door. He doesn't wait, and he hears the stumbling footsteps as the man hurries after him.

"What?" he says, and Mick can feel his hand moving after him as if to stop him, before he pulls it back like he's afraid it'll burn. "Please, you have to tell me, I can't-"

"Was that the only thing you needed the hospital for?" Mick cuts him off, stopping on the threshold and glaring back at him.

"No," the man says, but he brings his crooked hand closer to his chest as he speaks. "I'm fine, I just really need to remember-"

"Hospitals aren't safe," Mick tells him flatly, and it's not even a lie. "Most of them got away. That'll be the first place they'll look. Lots of hostages. I have a place. We can go there. It'll be safe for now. I'll contact the CCPD, but I don't trust them. I don't know how exactly they got to you. They might have a leak."

"What about the machine?" the man asks, lingering before it as though it's some kind of altar. "It, it might be dangerous, I think. They seemed to want it to be dangerous, I don't know what I've actually done, I hope it doesn't do anything, but we shouldn't leave it-"

"I'll deal with it," Mick says. "I can get it to the van if you're not comfortable with it going to the CCPD."

"Not if you don't trust them," the man says.

"But for now, getting you to safety is my top priority," Mick finishes. That sounds good, he thinks. The sort of thing he'd say if he really were a bodyguard. The man's clearly convinced; he starts moving towards Mick again, slowly, each placement of his feet thought through, as though he's hiding more pain than Mick's seen. He lets Mick lead him from the room, hesitates for just a little too long on the threshold, like the door's been locked for so long that he doesn't really understand it now it's open.

"Come on," Mick says, swallows his impatience and the impulse to drag him out into the corridor. Takes a gamble, because at some point the man's going to expect him to know his name. "Doctor."

"Ray, please," the man says, and steps gingerly out after him. He smiles at Mick, strained but genuine, and Mick's stomach clenches uncomfortably. He doesn't even flinch away when Mick gives him a gentle push in the general direction of the outside. "You've saved my life, I think you're entitled to my first name."

"Ray," Mick says, and it feels odd in his mouth. He wants to call him something different, something easy and impersonal, but he's sure nicknames wouldn't fit his cover, and he doesn't want to blow it. He's not sure how much more Ray can stand to be hurt.

* * *

Ray sits in the back of the van like he's afraid someone's going to tip him from his seat, hunched around and wincing every time Mick loads a part of the machine with more than the necessary force. It's the noise, Mick thinks, the impact, rather than any actual concern for the monstrosity. He would prefer not to bother - he doubts the thing is worth anything, no matter what the thieves seemed to think Ray was capable of - but Ray refuses to leave it behind on the off-chance that he's managed to tinker together something catastrophic. Mick doesn't fight him on it. He's not sure he'd win.

He had offered to help a few times, but Mick had refused. Ray looks as if he'd fall over if he tries to lift anything, and after hauling down everything from the room where they'd been keeping him, Mick doesn't want to have to carry him too.

"Sorry I couldn't tell you what was important," Ray says, folding himself even further forwards. The shadows deepen around his face, smoothing away all but the deepest bruises. "Are you sure I can't-"

"Bodyguard, remember?" Mick snaps, and pauses, remembers himself, forces his voice more gentle. "It’s my job."

"I'm not sure-"

"Only one of us remembers what it says in my job description,” Mick says. “And it ain't you."

Ray smiles at that, at least. He's pretty, in the half-light where Mick can't see him properly. Mick slams the van’s doors, and for just the barest instant while his eyes adjust, Ray might as well not be there.

“Stay back here,” Mick tells him, hesitating on his way through to the front. “Keep out of sight.”

“Won’t they know I’m in the van already, if they’re watching?”

“Harder to shoot you than in the front seat.”

“Right.” Ray reaches for a seatbelt only to stub his mangled fingers against it. If he had been planning on saying anything else, it’s lost in a hiss of pain. Mick leans in to fix it for him, silently asking Snart if he had known that pulling something like this would be quite so much like trying to lead around a toddler with no sense of personal safety. He would have, would have known exactly what to do, too, all his sympathetic faces carefully prepared. Ray would have been eating out of his hand.

“Thank you,” Ray says. He looks up at him, his face inches from Mick’s, and there’s no fear in his eyes, in his posture. There had been so much, before, dripping off him like oil, and the lack of it makes something squirm uncomfortably in Mick’s gut.

Mick leans back, makes a mental note to blame all his discomfort on Snart, and climbs the rest of the way into the front seat without replying. He scans the street, searching for someone searching for him, but there’s no one, and he breathes out an irritable sigh. They aren’t even brave enough to come and challenge him for what he’s taken. Not even with everything they must have invested in taking him.

There’s still time, Mick decides. If they don’t take this bait, he can hunt them down individually. And they will, he hopes that they will. That they’ll block the road, that he’ll see a familiar car in the mirror, that the air will crack with a gunshot and he’ll be able to stop thinking.

All that happens is that he gets maybe five minutes down the road before one of the wheels hits a pothole, and he hears Ray yelp from the back, the noise so swallowed it’s barely audible.

“You good?” he asks. Wishes he hadn’t, and then rationalises that it’s what he should have done, that he would hardly be able to ignore it if he was who he had claimed to be.

Ray breathes for a second, steadying himself, before he replies. Mick can hear the harshness of it, imagines Ray’s jaw clenched around the pain.

“Fine.”

It’s a lie. Not even a good one. Even if the word hadn’t shaken on its way out, there’s not any way for Ray to be fine, not given the bruises and the blood and the way he’s been carrying himself. But there’s nothing Mick can do about it now, no point in any of it if he stops and to pick up painkillers and splints and Ray’s gone by the time he gets back. He’ll sort it once he’s got Ray somewhere out of the way, let him start tinkering again if that’s what keeps him quiet.

They make it the rest of the way in silence, and Mick’s glad of it. It makes it easier to ignore that tiny worm of disquiet, swelling and writhing in his intestines.

If Mick has any anger about the state Ray’s been left in (if his jaw aches with it, tightens with each new cut he sees until his teeth feel at shattering point) it’s purely on a professional level, he decides. Even _he_ knows that when you want someone to build something, you don’t damage the head or the hands. They’ve injured both and rendered Ray useless. It’s sloppy, and it’s left Mick with far more cleanup than he’d like.

Cleanup which would be going a lot faster if Ray didn’t flinch away every time Mick runs a cloth across his skin. He mutters an apology for it, every time, his eyes canted off to the side, unable to look at Mick, holds his breath, tries to steel himself, to stay still like Mick had told him at the start. Watches the frankenstein of machinery that Mick had dumped haphazardly onto the floor, as if looking for a still point in his storm. It never works. The instincts his captors instilled in him have made it too deep, into his brain, into his bones.

It probably doesn’t help that the place Mick had chosen isn’t so very different from the one that he and Ray had just fled - blacked out windows, an electricity supply so dodgy that the lights flicker if Mick walks too violently, small enough that the cot he’d set up along one wall dominates the space - but if Ray has any complaints about it, he keeps them to himself. It’s about as safe as Mick wants it to be. He and Snart had used it, once or twice, but never for very long. They both prefer open spaces. But Mick needs doors now, ones he can lock and tell Ray it’s for his protection. Ray had nodded and accepted it, and hadn’t seemed to realise that he had traded one imprisonment for another.

He won’t, if everything goes to plan. The thieves will come after their investment and Mick will kill them, and maybe he’ll drop Ray off at the hospital, still none the wiser. The only alternative is killing him too, and Mick’s not in the mood for that, not when it’ll render everything he’s doing now a waste, that there’s no point in the bowl of water he’s brought from the sink to clean his wounds, or the blanket he’d found for the cot, or the machine that he’d carried up the narrow stairs.

Mick draws the cloth through his hair, searching for the source of the blood on his face, and Ray hisses, twitches away from him.

“Sorry,” Ray murmurs again, and Mick says nothing. Just does his best to ignore the sensation of the water running over his knuckles, cool against his skin. The way that Ray’s blood mingles with it, turning it an ugly pink in the bowl.

Mick nods, and cups a hand around the back of his head to hold him still. He feels the start of the flinch, and then Ray freezes himself in place, blinks hard. There’s swelling starting to threaten around one of his eyes, the skin blackened with bruising. Mick will get him some ice, he decides, even if that will take his one useable hand away from his tinkering. It’s worthwhile if it lets him keep up the ruse of being a good and helpful employee.

They manage like that, Ray near-trembling with the effort of not moving, and Mick pretending not to notice it, until Mick reaches towards Ray’s arm, and he startles back so violently that he’s three paces away from the cot before the rest of his brain catches up.

“Sorry,” he says again, but he takes another step away. “I’d just, rather you didn’t.”

“Can you use that at all?” Mick asks. Stays where he is.

Ray studies his arm like it’s not a part of him. Mick studies it too, from the crooked fingers to the scabbing and bruising across the wrist - there are different shades of them. The darkest are the traces of a hand.

“Yes,” Ray says. Hesitates, words catching. “No. I don’t think there’s any nerve damage. I don’t know. I’m not a medical doctor, I don’t think, they wanted me to build that so I assume I’m not. It hurts.”

“I’ll get you something for that,” Mick says. “But they need splinting. They’ll heal wrong. Hospital will have to re-break them.”

Ray pulls the arm back in against his chest, and the knuckles of his good hand are white.

“You need anything else for that?” Mick gestures at the metallic monstrosity on the floor. It takes a long moment for Ray to follow it, and then he blinks.

“I thought-” he says, the words so slow and confused that Mick’s stomach drops with them, with the idea that he’s blown it. His hand twitches, trying to creep towards his gun, and he stills it. “I thought I didn’t have to do that anymore.”

“You don’t,” Mick says. “Thought it might help you get some memories back. Familiar activities help.” It’ll keep him out of the way.

“They do?”

“Heard that somewhere.” For all Mick knows, it might be even true.

Ray brightens a little, focuses on the pile of broken machinery. “I really don’t know,” he says. “But I suppose I can try, take my mind off-” he pauses, and Mick can see the sentence taking his mind back to everything he’s been trying to forget. “Off everything that’s happened,” he finishes, his voice getting a little stronger. It sounds too deliberate, to Mick’s ears, like he’s trying to fend it all off. He’d heard Snart talk like that. Hadn’t pursued it then, and he isn’t going to now.

“Food,” he says.

“What?”

“They feed you?”

“Enough,” Ray says. “Water, too. They wanted me to be be able to work, I kept telling them that I couldn’t, that it didn’t matter what they did, I just don’t know _how_ to-”

“I’ll get some takeout,” Mick says. “What do you like?”

“Don’t remember,” Ray says, and there’s the faintest ghost of a smile on his face. “Careful, I might have allergies.”

Mick grunts. He thinks about smiling back, but he’s not sure he’d get it right. He stands, and, as he withdraws, Ray makes his careful way back to the cot, like an animal only comfortable reclaiming its space once any invaders have gone. If he notices, he doesn’t show it.

“When I get back I’ll get the shower working,” Mick says. “You could do with one.”

“A shower would be nice,” Ray says.

Mick nods and turns his back.

“Thank you,” Ray says again, and Mick pauses. “You’re right, I don’t know what your job description is, but you’re probably going above and beyond.”

Mick doesn’t respond, and there’s a desperate twitch of sincerity about Ray’s face.

“When I get my memory back,” he says. “Remind me that you need a raise?”

Ray doesn’t protest when he locks the door behind him.

Ray Palmer remembers Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. He can imagine it: a pyramid, striped through with colours from red to blue. The physiological - food, water, sleep, shelter - at the base, then safety, love, esteem, and self-actualisation, climbing upwards, and, so far as he understands it, becoming less vital. It seems natural, when he pictures it. A person needs to be alive first. He’s not a psychologist, he doesn’t think, but that feels right.

According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, he should be able to eat the takeout Mick’s brought. And there’s a part of him that thinks that’s an excellent idea - he’s hungry, hadn’t realised quite how hungry until Mick had unlocked the door again and the smell had wreathed itself around him like a promise. His stomach feels as though it’s trying to fold in on itself.

He can’t. Can’t reach for it even when Mick sets the bag down on the cot and tells him to take his pick of the boxes. He doesn’t trust it, can’t ignore the whispering in his head that Mick might have put something in it, that he’ll manage four forkfulls and then the world will start to spin and sway away from him, and he’ll have lost what little control he has left, a puppet inside his own limbs.

Ray’s sure it’s irrational. If his captors had thought that drugging him could make him more compliant, they would have tried it a long time ago, and it wouldn’t have helped, because he _can’t_ comply. Doesn’t know how. And he had told them and told them and they hadn’t believed him, but at least what they had done to him had let him distract himself from the black hole in his head where his identity should be. He feels the edges of it, jagged in his skull. Mick’s the first person to believe him, to accept what he had told him, and he has no more reason to drug him than any of the others. Less, if his story’s to be believed. But he doesn’t remember Mick. And that’s irrational too, because of course he doesn’t remember Mick, he doesn’t remember himself, doesn’t remember anyone. He can barely remember which way electricity goes round a circuit, should count himself lucky he’s still got that, the English language, and at least one psychological model.

He can’t move past it, though. He has no proof that Mick is who he claims to be, and he’s not an idiot. Mick could be anyone, and the doubts creep through Ray’s head like weeds, only growing thicker with every passing minute since that first initial burst of relief. Mick could be one of his captors - he knows there were more of them, that he didn’t see - or someone equally bad. Ray hopes he isn’t, hopes with all the air in his chest that he isn’t, that he’s everything he’s claimed. His brain tells him that it should be easy to accept, that Mick hasn’t threatened him, hasn’t asked about the machine - has barely even looked at it - and then there’s the corpse that they had had to step over. Ray had recognised him, had the imprint of his fist somewhere in his back. Surely they wouldn’t have killed someone just to sell a ruse.

If he isn’t who he says, it doesn’t really change anything. Ray has no choice but to go along with the ruse, if there is one. He doesn’t doubt that Mick could subdue him in an instant if he wanted to, that he could break Ray in half if he wanted. Better to just pretend that he believes it, let it play out, and try to avoid another beating.

He can feel Mick watching him, and his skin prickles with it. He’s probably just noticing that Ray’s been chasing his rice around its tray with a fork instead of eating it, staring at the grains as they pass through the gaps in the plastic, but Ray still feels the need to hunch against it, to hide.

“How did your meeting with the CCPD go?” he asks, trying to forestall any questions. Only realises that it could be taken as a prodding at Mick’s cover story after it’s out.

Mick shrugs, but his attention stays fixed on Ray, and he shrinks under the scrutiny.

“They said you’re better off here,” he says. “Your case is stalling. I don’t trust them.”

“Have they been able to find out who the, the body was?”

“They’ve got no idea,” Mick says. “Wanted me to bring you in to give a statement.”

Ray recoils, the movement knocking into his tray. He tries to steady it with his free hand, remembers too late that that isn’t an option - his fingers brush against the foil, and pain blooms in his hand, reminds him of the roots it has already grown up his arm. He sways, balance lost, forced from his head just like his hunger. Tries to remember enough numbers to count himself out.

Mick’s still talking, but Ray doesn’t hear him. He stops a moment later, reaches out, so nonchalantly that Ray could choose to believe that he hadn’t seen any of it, and pushes Ray’s tray back towards him. Ray doesn’t reach for the fork again.

“Didn’t think you were up to going over that again,” Mick says, and he’s right. Ray’s having enough trouble convincing himself he’s somewhere different, thinking through the mess of anxiety in his head, he doesn’t want to think himself back to that, to the point where his memories start, when he’s cringing back from sudden shouting, from people stronger than him trying to force him to do something he couldn’t. “Told them it could wait until you got your memories back.”

“Do you think I will?” Ray asks. The others had, on the occasions when they decided to believe him, for the sake of argument. Had assumed that either he’d somehow manage to build them what they wanted purely on instinct, or that he’d remember partway through the process. By the time that Mick had arrived, they had been mostly leaving him alone, letting him stew in all the memories that they had given him, the only ones he had.

“Not a doctor,” Mick says, like it’s not important.

“Okay,” Ray says. He eyes his rice, wishes that he could manage a mouthful of it, that he could feel the energy seeping back into his limbs, that it would clear some of the prickling suspicion from his head, reaffirm the knowledge that if Mick had wanted something, he would have just taken it, or made some sort of indication of it by now. Directed him towards the machine, asked for progress (there hasn’t been any, hasn’t ever been any - as far as Ray’s memories go back, all he’s done is stare at the components like a retail worker suddenly unable to count the change in their hand, occasionally sticking one to another in a desperate bid to look like he’s done something).

Mick finishes his own meal, and extracts a box of painkillers from the bottom of the bag, deposits them onto the cot in his wake.

“For when you’ve eaten,” he says. “Should help with the arm. Get some sleep.”

He leaves Ray to his doubts, trying to breathe past the sound of the lock.

Ray’s tinkering doesn’t seem to involve doing any actual work on the machine. He sits cross-legged on the floor of the horrific twisting of wire and metal, somehow utterly unaware of the possibility of it falling on him, and Mick sits on the cot, his gun laid out in pieces in front of him. He’s supposed to be cleaning it, to be taking it apart and putting it back together again until he can do it without thought. He doesn’t need the practice, but it’s something to do while he waits.

He doesn’t need to be doing it in the same room as Ray, either. But it’s been a long time since he’s had company.

Ray holds a component up next to the machine, and squints, eyes flicking between it and the machine as if he’s trying to work out where it fits, before he sets it back down and picks up another one. He’s pulled his sleeve up, and Mick can see more bruises there, spiralling up his skin. They’re starting to heal now, turning a sickly yellow-green colour. He still holds his other arm awkwardly against his chest, but Mick’s sure the pills and the splints have helped. There doesn’t seem to be quite so much pain in his movements any longer.

Mick looks away, because even though Ray’s got a little better, watching him for too long seems to make him uncomfortable. He’ll fold in on himself, and there’ll be no focus in it when he looks at the machine.

He doesn’t begrudge Ray his lack of productivity, when the machine means nothing to him. If it’s worth something at the end of it, that’s a bonus, he supposes, but he doubts it. It’s just something to keep him occupied while they wait.

Part of Mick’s starting to think that they aren’t going to come. It’s been nearly a full week now, and there’s been nothing. He’s set up some perimeter alarms, keeps an eye on his phone on his odd trips out for food and to convince Ray he’s still talking to the CCPD, but there’s not been any sign of the thieves. While he’s sure he can be as patient as he needs to, the possibility sits, at the edge of his mind, that they just aren’t going to come. That they’ve taken what he’d left in the house and gone, decided not to tangle with him.

He’s not sure what he’s going to do with Ray, either way. If they do come, he’s a witness to murder. Part of him’s sure that doesn’t matter, that the police are after him for enough that a few more corpses won’t mean anything, but the rest still instinctively wants to clean up. But the thought of that makes the worm of discomfort in his intestines bloat into something more like a snake, knot itself tighter into his flesh.

Mick wonders, as he turns back to his gun, if this is what Snart had felt. If morality is some sort of contagious disease, which Snart had caught from that vigilante, and then passed on to Mick. And then he cuts it off, because he isn’t going the way of Snart, he’s not going to end up in Iron Heights, he’ll kill Ray if he has to, and if he doesn’t, it’ll be because it’s useful to have people owe you favours, and Mick had saved his life.

Even if it was just to use him.

The thought makes the snake squirm a little more violently, and he smashes his gun back together with far more force than he needs to. Ray doesn’t seem to notice, too busy staring at the component in his hand as if he’s never seen one before, and maybe he hasn’t.

Mick leaves the door unlocked. He’s not going far, and Ray won’t leave the room without him anyway. It’s about giving the illusion of freedom, and not about the way that Ray’s face seems to drop whenever he turns the key. He hasn’t seen that, not properly. For all he knows it makes him feel safer, isn’t just another reminder of everything they’d done to him to try and ensure his cooperation.

He wants to drive to Iron Heights, break Snart out, punch him, beg him for advice. Snart will say something smart that Mick won’t understand, and sort everything out, and Mick will hate him and love him for it and everything will go back to how it was before.

Except. Except, the Snart that Mick had cared about wouldn’t hesitate putting a bullet in Ray’s head. Not once they’d got everything they needed from him.

Mick should have been ready to do that, too.

He isn’t.

He’s tried. Thought himself through the idea, following the lines of it as he sits and works in the same place as Ray, and every time he gets to the crucial moment, all he can remember is Ray, sitting in the back of his van, looking as small as someone of his size could, thanking Mick for rescuing him, and he can hardly move for it.

_This is your fault_ , he thinks, in Snart’s general direction, and glances back towards Ray’s door. _Yours too_.

Ray can’t sleep. He tries, gets there, sometimes, but the dreams don’t let him stay that way. He needs to. The exhaustion weighs on him, a heaviness in his bones, pulling him down until all that he can do is lie there, folded onto the narrow cot, clutching the too-thin blanket and waiting for the next wave.

It feels like every time he closes his eyes he’s back there, trying to escape the hands that catch him anyway, drag him out into the light no matter what he does. The back of his collar digs at the bruising on the back of his neck as he tries to squirm away, the grip in the front of his shirt too strong. There’s nothing he can get a purchase on, his fingers sliding uselessly off the floor. Then there’s a blunt impact against the side of his face, and he sees stars. Goes limp, never able to recover enough of himself to resist being hauled the rest of the way out. Faces swim above him, and he tries to strike at them, but there must be something wrong in his depth perception, because he can never hit them, can never land a blow. They always do, and it hurts, even in the dreaming. He can’t get away. He knows, even if he could ever make it to the door, it will be locked.

In the dreams, he calls out for Mick. That’s the only name he knows to call out for. In the dreams, Mick doesn’t come, never comes, and he stays trapped in that room. His captors stop asking him to build their machine, no longer want anything from him but his pain, and he gives it to them.

He wakes with what he’s sure are fresh bruises, and there’s a shape, standing halfway between the bed and the door.

“Mick?” he asks. It’s hard to make anything out in the dark, but he’s sure he recognises him, and his throat catches with the idea that he had called for him here, too, disturbed him. “Did I wake you? I’m sorry-”

“Go back to sleep,” Mick says, gruffly, and turns back towards the door.

Ray doesn’t feel fine. But he doesn’t call after Mick, doesn’t ask him to stay, no matter that he can feel the need to in his throat. He’s not a child, even if his memories don’t go back as long as the average twelve-year-old’s. Mick doesn’t lock the door. Part of Ray wishes that he would, just so that he won’t have the option of running, running away from it all, wandering the city at night until he finds either some way of remembering who he was, or that he can exist as just a skull full of the cool dark breeze.

He doesn’t. Can’t. As many demons as there are in the room where he tries to sleep, there are ones out there that can hurt him worse, and for all that Mick’s still not done anything to prove who he is, he’s been keeping Ray safe from them.

Maybe the Ray Palmer he had been before, the person his captors had been telling him he was, would be able to keep himself safe. Ray Palmer was probably braver than him. Tougher. Sometimes, he wishes he could summon him, just so he wouldn’t have to be himself anymore, chased around his own skull by what isn’t going to hurt him anymore. But he doesn’t know if Ray Palmer even exists anymore, if his memories will ever fit back into his flesh. Ray wants to apologise to him, for taking his name, but he has no better way of labelling himself.

Perhaps he doesn’t want them to. He has no way of knowing who the original Ray Palmer was, not when Mick won’t tell him. If he’s the sort of person that Ray would want to be.

Ray slides off the cot, pulling the blanket with him, wrapping it around his shoulders as tightly as he can. He sits before the machine like it’s an altar, his hand resting on the ground in front of it, and he’s half-sure that he can feel grooves, worn into the floor from his supplication. He stares into knot of wire as though it’s a crystal ball, as though his future and his past might be written there, in binary he can no longer read.

The real Ray Palmer is supposed to be in there, somewhere. If only he can figure it out, he can have it all back.

And then he won’t be himself anymore. He’ll be whoever it is that’s been forged of a different set of memories, even if his own are still there. His own may not be up to much. He remembers being struck, having things demanded of him that he couldn’t give, remembers not having the tools to make it stop. They’re his, though, make him into his worthless self, and the idea of giving it up is a shock to his system like ice water. All that time, wanting to remember, and now, sitting here in the dark, too afraid of it and of who he might become to look properly.

He stays like that until his legs start to lose feeling. Goes back to the cot, wishes that he could dream of flying through circuit boards and coils of wire the size of pythons, or of fighting a golem made from machine parts. It would be better, he thinks, to dream any other sort of nightmare.

He expects to slip back into the same one as before, as if he had never left it. To crawl from it with his fingers clawed into the blanket, joints aching and mind frantic. Lies there, waiting for it. Watching the shadows play over the machine’s skeleton, wondering if maybe Ray Palmer had done something to deserve what had happened, if he should hate him for it, if Ray Palmer was scarier than any of the people who had hurt him.

When he dreams again, one of the men standing over him is wearing his face. In this one, he manages to get hold of a length of pipe, but he can’t hit them with that, either. The real Ray Palmer takes it off him, shows him how it’s properly used. Ray tries to cower his way back into wakefulness, but the man he doesn’t want to be stands between him and the door, and there’s nothing he can do to escape him.

Mick isn’t going to kill Ray. He wakes up, and he thinks it, it’s the last thing in his mind before he sleeps, it hovers at the edge of his consciousness during his ever waking hour. The very idea of it makes him feel so sick he can hardly stand; the snake in his gut grown large enough to eat him alive - maybe it already has. That would explain it, why he suddenly doesn’t want to be using Ray anymore, why he keeps rehearsing in his head a conversation where he tells Ray who he is, takes him to a hospital and leaves him there.

Except, he’s bought all his own lies, too - he can’t take Ray to a hospital, because that would make it easier for anyone looking for him to find him. And maybe killing the thieves is still a priority, but it’s not just off the back of Snart’s painting anymore. He has better reasons now, he thinks. Reasons like hearing Ray calling for him in the middle of the night, for the man who’d been seriously considering killing him since they’d met.

He’s never sure if he’s supposed to wake him, when it happens. Usually, he just lets him sleep, tries to be reassuring when he wakes. He doesn’t know if it works, but Ray never calls for him more than once per night, so he assumes it does. Ray doesn’t seem to get any less exhausted, though, seems to be half sleepwalking through his days, watching and thinking things that Mick can’t see.

He does his best to make things more comfortable, brings more blankets and painkillers, does his best to research amnesia - from what he can tell, total loss of self like Ray’s is rare, rare enough that no one seemed able to say, definitively, whether his memories would come back or not. Can’t quite believe himself when he tries to explain it all away as needing to adopt a new stray since he’d lost Snart.

Mick half-wishes that he won’t remember. That he’ll be able to go on with this situation without it ever falling apart, get Ray some new, better memories, so he won’t ever miss his old ones. But he can’t. Ray trusts him to do the right thing, and the knowledge of that weighs at him, an albatross around his neck. And maybe he’s not sure what the right thing is, but he can tell what it isn’t, and it isn’t lying to Ray just to get what he wants. Snart would know, he thinks, but he wouldn’t understand.

Mick hardly understands himself. He tries to, sits and watches Ray work - work is a strong term, he’s picked up and put down the same component five times now and still seems not to know what to do with it - and tries to reason through why _this_ , after everything he’s done, everyone he’s killed, is a line he’s not ready to cross.

“I think I might have remembered something,” Ray says, gone suddenly still, not looking around at him, but clearly still aware of his exact position. Mick feels something in his chest crunch in a way that he hasn’t since he was a child - he thinks it’s the fear of being found out, the fear of losing, but he can’t be certain of anything but the nausea of it.

He grunts, because Ray hasn’t said anything more. Clearly wants some kind of acknowledgement.

“I think I dreamed it,” Ray says, but there’s an uncertain waver in his voice. His component is clenched so tightly in his good hand that it’ll leave an imprint on his palm. “I’ve been dreaming a lot, lately, most of it isn’t very nice, but there’s this woman-”

Of course there’s a woman. Mick doesn’t hear the rest of what he says, lets it fade into the background in favour of his own thoughts, forces the idea of it as far away from him as he can, but still can’t stop thinking of it. Of course Ray has someone. He’s handsome and smart and his hair does that thing that it does. She’s probably as pretty as he is, some perfect couple, glossy like the front of a magazine. He shouldn’t be surprised. He _isn’t_ surprised, and he’s not disappointed either.

“What do you think?” Ray asks, and lapses into silence, waiting for Mick to say something.

Mick grunts again, and Ray nods, as if he’s just said something helpful. He hopes he hasn’t.

Ray’s still not moving, his head tipping forward into a slump.

“Spit it out,” Mick growls, and Ray starts like he’d forgotten he was there. He reaches for the machine, but his hands are too careful, too hesitant, for it to be anything other than a distraction from what he’s about to say.

“What if,” he says, and he stares fixedly at the wires as he wraps them around his fingers. “I’m not a good person? The me I can’t remember, I mean. What if I’ve hurt people, or-” he cuts himself off, fusses at the casing. “I can hardly be very nice if I’m mixed up in all this.”

_If you weren’t such a good person, everything would be fine_

, Mick thinks. Hates it.

“What if this is what I do,” Ray says, glances over his shoulder at Mick. “Make things that hurt people. I don’t want to be that. They clearly thought I could do it, I don’t know why they’d think that if-”

“We’ll deal with it,” Mick says, nods towards the hammer he’d brought along with the rest of it from the thieves’ hideout, abandoned against one wall, doesn’t miss the way that Ray flinches away from it.

“Can we deal with me?” Ray asks. His eyes meet Mick’s, dark and flat. “If I remember, does the person I am now just go? Do I get replaced by him? Do I have to be everything he is, along with everything I am?”

“Plenty of good people get caught up in bad stuff,” Mick tells him. Snart would have laughed, to hear that, he thinks, and his fingers curl into fists, the leather of his gloves creaking with it.

“I just wish you could tell me who I was,” Ray says, and there are cracks in the smile he directs at Mick.

“So do I,” Mick says. Means it. Maybe he should have researched him, found himself an internet connection and looked him up. He’d considered it, but it hadn’t felt right, and he’d decided that if there was anything bad, it wouldn’t show up anyway. But Ray looks at him, and Mick wants to banish the concerned creases from his face before they’re stuck there forever.

“Am I like him, at all?” Ray asks.

“We weren’t close,” Mick says, but it feels like a cop out, and Ray’s nod is far too understanding. “But I think so.”

“That’s his loss, then,” Ray says, and offers him one last smile before he looks back towards the machine.

“What?”

Ray pauses, as though he thinks it should be obvious what he means.

“I like spending time with you,” he says, like it’s the simplest thing in the world.

It doesn’t mean anything, Mick decides. The only other people Ray remembers spending time with had been torturing him. He doesn’t have enough experience to make a proper comparison.

He gets up to leave, and as he walks past Ray, he can feel everything he’s not been telling him bubbling on his tongue, and something in his chest says to come clean. He strangles it back before it can come loose. If he tells Ray now, he’ll catch himself up in the snarl of barbed-wire lies, and Mick can’t take the risk that he’ll trip into an even worse situation. Once it’s all dealt with, then he’ll tell him, and Ray will leave him, and it’ll be for the best.

But he’s stopped there now, Ray looking up at him, waiting for something.

“Even if you’ve done things you ain’t proud of,” he says, and the words feel heavy in his throat, across his tongue. He can’t meet Ray’s eyes as he says them. “People change.” Mick doesn’t want him to. Doesn’t want this Ray to change into something different, something else, even if he’s not afraid of finding a monster the way Ray is. But maybe it’ll be fitting. The man Mick’s learning is Ray will be different or gone, and Ray will find that his Mick has been a lie all along, and that’ll be an end to it.

The first thing that Ray discovers about Mick finally manage to get the power to stop stuttering in and out is that it really doesn’t change anything. He can’t plug himself into the wall the way he can the soldering iron and suddenly remember everything forgotten, doesn’t think he’d want to if he could. It doesn’t light up a holographic display showing the exactly location and reasons of everyone who’d kidnapped him. It doesn’t magically fix his arm. And he forgets that, of course he forgets that, doesn’t remember until he reaches for something and there’s a crunch of pain in his wrist, flaring up his shoulder and beyond his fingers, further, into the space where he has no flesh and his agony has no business being. It’s there anyway.

Ray keeps still until it dies back again, a rhythm that’s become too familiar. Glances at the soldering iron, already warm in its cradle. He reaches for it with his good hand, and he can feel the heat in the air around it. If he switches it off, it’ll be a waste of power. It’ll probably be that anyway. He’s not even working on the machine anymore. Mick had found him the components for a simple circuit, told him it might be easier to start smaller, though Ray’s half-sure that what he’d actually meant was that adding another layer of directionless wires to the machine might finally make it unstable enough to fall on them.

There’s a part of him that wants it to fall, wants to knock it down himself, to hear it shatter, pieces skittering away on the floor, to have nothing left of the monument to his suffering but a blackened crater in the floor. He doesn’t know what stops him. Something does. He doesn’t know how to move against it, but wanting it feels like trying to push opposing ends of a magnet together.

He should be able to do the circuit. He can see it - switch, battery, LED. The simplest possible. There are six points where he needs to solder. It’s not difficult. He’d managed to strip the ends of the wires just fine. He could ask Mick, but it doesn’t feel like there’d be much point in it if he’s not the one to do it.

The iron feels right in his hand, he decides. He knows what it does. First he’ll have to warm the components, and then he’ll apply the solder, which will melt, and should run into the joint. It’ll solidify there, gleaming and silver, and the light will blink on when he flicks the switch. The circuit will be a whole, changed, finally working as it’s supposed to.

“Drop it,” Mick growls.

“What?” Ray glances around at him, and he sighs, stands away from what must now be the cleanest gun in the northern hemisphere.

“Drop it,” he repeats, and gestures towards the soldering iron. “It’s a two-handed job. You’ll hurt yourself.”

“I’m fine,” Ray says, but Mick moves closer, and he slots it back into its cradle before he can take it off him. “Why did you bring me that, if I can’t use it?”

“You need it done, I’ll do it.” Mick moves him into his space, half-lifts him from his chair when he doesn’t move immediately out it. Picks up the iron as though he’s done it a thousand times. Maybe he has. “Tell me where.”

“You know where-”

“Tell me where,” Mick repeats, and Ray gives in, shifts to point over his shoulder. Watches as Mick heats the components with the sort of fixed focus that he can bury himself in, bury himself so deep that he won’t have to think about how he’s leant in so close to Mick that he can pick up the scent of smoke from his clothes, wood rather than cigarette.

He has clearly done this before, Ray thinks, as the smell of the solder curls into his head. It feels like something shifts behind his eyes with it, something stirring like a mouse under a leaf, and he shys away from it. Watches Mick’s hands instead, the same ones that had tended to his wounds with the sort of gentleness that he wouldn’t have thought Mick was capable of at first, and then he has to swallow that, too, because this isn’t the time to develop some sort of White Knight complex complex for Mick ( _liar, too late_ ). Mick doesn’t deserve that, probably just wants it all to be over so he can go back to doing whatever it is that bodyguards normally do, which as far as Ray’s aware, is standing unobtrusively in corners wearing dark suits and glasses and waiting for someone to shoot at their boss.

Not that he can really picture Mick in a suit. He’s sure he’d look great in it, but maybe out of place, too. Ray’s not sure, he just can’t imagine Mick in anything other than his jacket and jeans.

“Like that?” Mick asks, turning his head towards Ray’s, and as he returns the iron to the cradle, there’s another rush of that smell, the sensation of something shifting in his mind.

Ray panics, something bright and fast rushing through his head, into his bloodstream, like he’s taken a shot of adrenaline straight to the brain. Wants to run, but he can’t flee his own consciousness. All he knows how to do, hardly able to think through his blurring thoughts, is jerk his head forward and kiss Mick. Everything goes still. Centred. The horizon just where it should be. There’s a moment where Mick doesn’t move, and one where Ray’s sure that he deepens it, that he can taste the heat of him, but that can’t be right, because then Mick is pulling back, recoiling.

“I’m sorry,” Ray says, as he stands from the chair so fast, so violently, that it goes toppling to the floor in his wake, a horrible clattering against Ray’s senses.

“I should go,” Mick says, and he doesn’t look at him, just strides back to the cot and scoops up the parts of his gun in one smooth motion. Turns back towards the door.

“Mick,” Ray says, takes half a step after him and then slumps back. “Mick, wait, I’m sorry, I-”

Mick’s already gone, and the lock clicks into place behind him. 

“Mick,” Ray says, but there’s no one there to answer. He can still smell the solder, crawling through his head, burning it into patterns he doesn’t want. He switches it off at the wall, but the odour’s in the air now, jabbing into his precarious sense of self. Stumbling backwards, as if the memories have a direction that he can flee from, he jars his arm against the edge of the cot.

The pain’s immediate, and he lets it drag a ragged sob from his throat. The noise is half one of relief; it’s like his synapses have been snuffed out, extinguished before any of them could give rise to anything that would take him away from himself.

Ray breathes, climbs into the cot and sits with his head back against the wall, trying to exist only as a machine, inhaling and exhaling and nothing beyond it. Eventually, he hopes, this moment will pass, and the memories will let him be. He’ll be allowed to stay this person, this self which wants to be good, he’ll be able to stay himself, in this little pocket of safety with Mick.

He tries not to know the futility of it, the impossibility. He can’t, can’t forget it any more than he can forget that Mick’s gone.

Maybe the other Ray Palmer will know what to say to him if he comes back.

* * *

_Idiot_ , Mick thinks. Slams his foot on the truck’s gas, lets it take him away from Ray, from all his lies, everything that’s wrong in his life. Everything that he’s _made_ wrong. Him. His fault. Snart’s fault. He should have made sure, been absolutely certain that he wasn’t going to end up like Snart before he’d involved himself in any of this.

He’d just thought that the worst thing that could happen to him was prison, that or death. Not love. Love had never even felt like a possibility for him, not really. It happens to other people. He’s not supposed to have it at all, especially not with someone who wouldn’t exist in the same way if he got his memories back.

That’s probably why it’s finally turned up, just so that the universe can laugh at him a little longer. The second Ray remembers who he is, at best he’ll know Mick for a liar, for someone who’s been using him as bait, and at worst, the person who’d kissed him like he’d saved his life would be gone.

Mick can’t stand it. Can’t think through the idea that he’ll let down someone who trusts him, just because they’ll heal. And at the same time, he’s half-understanding, half-sure that that’s the way it should go.

He doesn’t know how long, how far, he drives. Distance doesn’t exist in his head anymore. At the end of it, he sits with a burner phone pressed to his ear, listening to it ring, and half-hoping that no one will answer.

It doesn’t take long. There’s a click, and then a long pause, as the man at the other end waits for him to speak first. He doesn’t.

“Mick,” Snart drawls into the phone. He sounds just the same. Like he’s been expecting this call, at this exact time, since his sentence was given. Like he has a whole auditorium sitting and listening to him, hanging off his every syllable. “Thought you didn’t want to talk to me anymore.”

“I don’t,” Mick says. He doesn’t think he does. Isn’t sure why he’s phoned, what to say, but whenever he was lost, there was always one person who wasn’t, one person who had a direction and a course, and that’s what he needs.

“What’s the problem, then?” Snart asks, after another long silence. “Afraid I’m not in a position to bail you out anymore, old friend.”

“What, they haven’t made you prison chaplain yet?” Mick growls. Regrets it the second it’s out. He needs Snart, needs him to tell him what to do, where to go. Needs his permission to go back to Ray, or to leave him far behind, abandon him to the police or his former captors, whichever find him first.

“Not yet,” Snart says. “Sunday sermons, not really my thing. What did you want, Mick?”

He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say. _Think I found myself a new partner_ , or _think I fell in love with a fake person_ , or _someone stole that painting so I stole something of theirs and now I think he stole me back_. He can’t articulate any of that in a way that Snart would understand, or not the Snart he wants to hear from, anyway.

He shouldn’t have to. Snart should have been here, with him. Understanding everything he’s gone through because he would have been side by side with him throughout it, gone through it too. If he had been there, none of this would have happened. But instead, Snart’s given up his code and found a new set of rules to bow to.

Mick doesn’t want that. He wants Ray. He wants to be and not to be the person that loving Ray makes him. The python in his gut is eating its own tail.

Snart won’t understand. Wouldn’t have understood. He was never one for loving anything new. He loved Lisa and the heist and Mick and nothing else in the world. Mick couldn’t explain anything else.

“Forget it,” Mick says, and hangs up. Nearly throws the phone out the window, lets it smash against the road, stamps fragments of screen into the asphalt. Doesn’t. Just tosses it onto the passenger seat, and leans back, staring out the windshield at the darkening sky.

Better to just sit there, he thinks, and wait for the CCPD to come and take him. He’ll tell them about Ray and they’ll go and sort it all out. If he’s lucky, Ray won’t testify at his trial, and he won’t have to see that face with a stranger behind it. There had been enough on his record to put him away for the rest of his life years ago. They won’t need Ray. He’ll be safe, and Mick will be with Snart again.

Maybe he’ll give in the same way Snart did.

He knows he can’t go back to that house. Can’t sit with Ray anymore, not when all his thoughts of him are tangled up in kissing him, the soft pressure of his lips, the taste of him. The way it had all felt _right_ , until it hadn’t. The way Ray had been trying to apologise to _him_ , the one who’d taken him away from anyone who could help him.

He wants to phone Snart again. Wants to delete the number. Wants to hear his voice, his calm, take his own from it. But that door’s closed.

As he watches it, the phone buzzes, and Mick starts, snatches at it. It slides away from his sudden grab at it, tumbles into the footwell. Head clouding with anger at it all, Mick gropes about for it, fingernails scratching at the detritus built up against the floor from too many bags of takeout.

When he finally gets hold of it, there’s an electric blue light blinking at the top of it, and it buzzes again in his hand.

It’s not Snart. Not a text at all, or a news story or a notification from a game app that’s never been deleted. It’s one of his perimeter alerts.

Mick drops the phone, neither seeing nor caring where it lands, and turns the key in the van’s engine. It sputters back into life, and he hauls at the wheel. Turns the van back the way he’d come. He almost doesn’t hear the tyres protesting. His head’s too full of the blue light, the implications of it. It has a noise in his skull.

It doesn’t matter how long, how far, he drives. He’s always going to be too late at the end of it.

* * *

At first, when Ray hears the noises outside, he thinks that Mick has come back. Scrambles up from the cot, and then stops, not sure if he should go towards the door or away from it, if Mick will even come to see him after Ray had so clearly upset him.

He should say something, shouldn’t say anything, doesn’t even know what he _could_ say. He could try and explain, try to tell Mick that he’d just been trying all he could think of not to remember, but he hadn’t been thinking, not at all, or he would have known that he’s not really the sort of person anyone would want to be with. Of course Mick had been horrified. Ray’s going to change, going to remember at least thirty years of existence, enough to turn him into a completely different person. Into the real Doctor Ray Palmer, a man of utterly unknown morals and motivation. Ray doesn’t want to be him.

Maybe he’s the reason why Mick hadn’t wanted to kiss him.

He’s still standing there, unsure of who to be and how to be it, when his brain starts to spark out warning signals. Something wants him to get back, to hide, but he’s numb, thinking in circles inside his own head. Even as more noise than Mick could ever produce on his own starts to shudder through the building.

He can’t hear it, too caught up in his own guilt, his own ephemeral existence, to be aware of anything else, until the door crashes in.

“Mick,” Ray says, but it isn’t. The man standing there is familiar, too familiar, his face one that Ray’s seen, horribly distorted, in his dreams, since before Mick had found him.

“Doctor Palmer,” the man says, and the panic wells in Ray’s throat, tastes cold. He wants to run, but there’s nowhere for him to go. He’ll crash into the walls like a moth outside a window pane, and his wings will stick there. “Ray,” he adds, and the savage, weaponised familiarity of it makes Ray’s skin crawl, the nausea pulsing in his chest like a living thing.

Ray staggers back, the jarring impacts of his footsteps sending a shattering sensation through his arm. He hardly feels it, his world shrinking and immeasurably vast, all the fragile defences that he’s built up crumbling away.

The man moves closer, and Ray remembers him. Not just from his dreams, not just from those weeks in the other place, but from a situation almost exactly like this. He’s standing in a glass office that doesn’t belong to him, until it bursts inwards and he isn’t standing anymore. He lies there, and sees this man as a silhouette in the sky above him.

“Doctor Palmer,” he says. “I have a job for you.”

In the memory, he tries to scrabble away, broken glass digging into his palm. His fingers brush against his phone, and the man strikes at them, hard. He screams, lurches the other way, and he’s aware of another motion, another impact. His vision cracks through with dark, and he’s swallowed by it an instant later, everything of him gone.

“You haven’t finished,” the man says, in the present.

Ray hardly hears him. He remembers. Remembers the woman he had told Mick about, the one he had felt so sad for, dying just metres away from him. His bones are at the wrong angle to crawl to her. All he can do is watch, his body unable to support either his weight or the strength of feeling that seems about to burst from his chest, too much for him to contain.

_Anna_ , he thinks, and the name hurts more than his arm. _Anna_. Anna and no one since.

He remembers everything of who he was, of who he is, the Ray Palmer he’d been too afraid to look at, and he’s startled by the way it doesn’t feel any different. He remembers everything he has ever known about circuits and physics and the shape of the universe, and he marvels at it all until he doesn’t. Until his entire being recoils away from the simple facts presented to him, his own knowledge.

All these memories, and Mick isn’t in any of them. He has never had a bodyguard. He had never seen Mick before the day he’d walked into that building and killed one of the men holding him.

It shouldn’t be a surprise. He’d suspected it, hadn’t he? Mick had never given him any proof of who he was, hadn’t been willing to tell him anything about himself, had always had another reason why they couldn’t go to the CCPD. He’d suspected it until he’d decided that he didn’t want to believe it, and he’d let those better angels convince him that Mick had only ever helped him.

Mick had lied to him, he thinks, had been lying to him, had been a part of his all along, and now the experiment was at an end. Ray would probably never see him again.

He stumbles, in no direction but down. The man grabs him by the front of his shirt, holds him up, stares down at him with a smile spiralling up one side of his face.

_No_ , Ray thinks, as violently as he can, forces it into every corner of his brain. Mick wouldn’t. Mick wasn’t. Maybe he wasn’t quite as official as he’d implied, but he’d protected him. He wasn’t one of them. He couldn’t be.

“I told you,” Ray lies. “I don’t remember anything. I can’t do what you want me to do.”

The man grips at the nape of his neck, and Ray hisses as his fingers find old bruises, slot exactly against them.

“We’ll see about that, shall we?” he says. “Perhaps we’ll be able to jog your memory.”

“You can hurt me all you want,” Ray says, and he sounds wretched even to his own ears, pleading, shaken by the onslaught of memories, his life still whirling through his head like a storm wind. He lets himself sag in the man’s grip, gives in to the stark horror of him. “Like you did before. I don’t remember. I don’t _know_. I didn’t even know my name until you told me, and for all I know you could have been lying.”

“Give you time,” the man says. His fingernails dig at Ray’s skin, and something inside him folds, crumples away and is lost. “Maybe a little more encouragement.”

* * *

There are too many of them. Mick watches them from across the street and hours too late, and he loses count. He wants to march in, to set the place on fire, take Ray and go, set his back to the last embers of it and never come back.

That’s not an option. Not yet.

They’ll have kept Ray alive, Mick decides. He was what they’d wanted in the first place. They still need him. Maybe they want Mick, too, want to kill him for killing one of theirs, a reversal of the situation that might have made him laugh, if he hadn’t had skin in the game. But Ray’s the prize. They want whatever they think he could give them. He’ll be all right.

Except he hadn’t been last time. Mick had been there for those nightmares, washed the blood off him, seen those bruises. They had done too much. If Ray gives them what they want, he won’t survive. If he doesn’t, they’ll work him over until he does, or they’ll go too far and kill him.

Ray just has to hold out until Mick can get to him, but they’ll have told him. He won’t be waiting for Mick. He can picture the scene like it’s something out of some godawful movie, Ray standing there, promising them that his bodyguard will come for him, and then they’ll be sorry. He can see the detail in the way his face will fall when he’s told that that was never what Mick was, that they had probably killed all his bodyguards to take him in the first place. Ray will know exactly who he is; an enemy, who had made his situation worse, and he’s going to hate him for it.

Mick should leave him. If he stays one way or another, he’ll end up having to burn his way out of a situation where Ray could be so very easily caught in the crossfire. He can go to the CCPD, turn himself in, tell them where to find Ray, but he remembers the casual way the thieves had kept their last place, remembers thinking that they probably had an inside man, and he can’t risk it.

Mick can’t leave him. He watches the thieves as they mill about the house, and he can’t stop wondering which of them have hurt Ray, which have made him bleed, had made him afraid to remember himself. He wants to torch them the way he had Snart’s precious painting. He’s going to get Ray out alive, kill everyone who had threatened him, then he’s never going to see him again, and even if the real Ray is completely different from the one that Mick had kissed, it’ll be worthwhile.

He sets his mind on that, his goal, and thinks of everything else as a barrier between him and it. Watches and waits and counts, does his best to think like Snart. There are too many of them. But they can’t all stay there forever. They’ll go out for food and home to see their loved ones, and when they do, Mick will be there.

* * *

“I am going to ask you again, Doctor Palmer,” the man says. He flexes his hand, the fingers skinned. Ray spits blood from his mouth.

“I don’t know,” he insists, tries to shake his head, but the motion makes his vision spiral. “I’m sorry.” He does, he’s not. He knows exactly what they want from him, knows how many people it could kill, knows that it’s nothing like what he’s been building in his time with Mick, a mess of wire and metal that’s a sculpture to his broken mind.

There’s another impact against his face, knuckles cracking into his cheekbone, and he lets himself fall sideways with it.

“How much more do you want me to hurt you, Ray?” the man asks, and his voice has turned almost gentle. He leans down towards him, and his face warps through Ray’s swimming vision, a parody of concern. “You just have to give me what I want, and then we’ll stop.”

“I can’t,” Ray says again, the words slurred against cut lips, and so repeated that they are beginning to lose their meaning.

The man lets out a long, low sigh, disappointed, and puts a hand under Ray’s chin, tilts his head up towards him.

“It’s such a shame,” he says, examining his handiwork. “To ruin you like this. I can think of so many better uses. And I’m tired of waiting for you to think up a better story, Ray.”

“It’s the truth,” Ray tells him. He can feel the vibrations of his voice against the man’s hand. “You know it is, I don’t want this. If I could tell you, I would have.”

The man hits him again, and again, and Ray curls in on himself. Loses the ability to distinguish between blows. He’s allowed to go down, to lose sense of it. Keeps waiting for the gentler touches, because he knows that they come next, the ones that are supposed to put him off-balance, stop him from developing any sort of tolerance for the violence, but they don’t come.

Perhaps the man is just too frustrated for them, or whatever deadline his employers have given him is coming closer, so close that he doesn’t have time to play with him any longer.

All he has to do is keep telling them he doesn’t remember, Ray tells himself, keep lying and wait until they leave him alone to stew for a while. He bites his lip around the truth, and tucks his uninjured hand protectively against his chest.

There’s a long moment of still that stretches into two, and then three, and Ray counts to twenty before he’s able to open his eyes. Even then, all he expects to see if the man’s face, smiling at him, in perfect focus, but he’s standing back a little, another shape next to him. Ray flattens himself closer against the floor, but the second person just says something that’s too far away for him to hear, and the man nods, and then the second shape’s gone, wandering back out into a hallway that Ray doesn’t remember.

“We’ve found something else we can use to persuade you,” the man says, and, behind him, where Ray’s vision turns indistinct, there’s motion. The man moves out of the way, crouches beside him, pulls him up onto his knees to let him see. It takes too long for the scene to resolve. He can make out one person, and then three, two standing either side of the first, guns drawn.

Mick. Ray’s stomach falls out from under him, and it’s all he can do to keep staring straight ahead, to keep the panic from his face.

“We caught him outside,” the man says, leaning down to talk into Ray’s ear, almost secretive. Ray tries to lean away from him, but the man wraps a hand around the far side of his neck and pulls him back. “I think he thought he could rescue you.”

Mick looks terrible, blood following the contours of his face down from a cut at his forehead, one eye swollen nearly shut. And still, Ray can see him watching, waiting for the moment when he’ll be able to get the better of his captors.

Even if he manages it, Ray will have no such opportunity. Their best option is still to wait.

“Since knocking you about doesn’t seem to have jogged your memory,” the man says, and Ray can feel his breath against his neck. “I was thinking we could try knocking him about instead. What do you think?”

_AnnaAnna_.

“I don’t know why you’d think I care what happens to him,” Ray says, coldly. “He kidnapped me too. He’s only here because he thinks I might be worth something.”

Some of the tension in Mick’s form drains away, and Ray looks away from him, as deliberately as he can.

“Then you won’t mind if we take him outside and shoot him,” the man says, and his fingers tighten over Ray’s throat.

“No,” Ray says flatly. The word feels like a betrayal, pulls at his ribs, threatens to snap them. He wants to plead, to beg, to give in, to tell them everything they want to know, and maybe Mick would have wanted him to. But he can’t, not without becoming everything he’d been so afraid of being.

“So you won’t help us?” the man asks, and his grip tightens, a pointed pressure against Ray’s skin.

“No,” Ray says. “I’ve told you, I can’t.”

“I don’t believe you,” the man tells him, soft, almost sing-song. He circles back around until he’s placed himself between Ray and Mick, pulls Ray’s chin up, forces him to look at him. “You can lie as well as you like, Doctor Palmer, but you can’t control your pulse. You’re going to give us everything we want, sooner or later, and then we’ll have a long, hard think about your future.”

He lets go, and Ray thumps back down onto the floor, skin squirming with the imprints of the man’s touch. He can’t stop his eyes from going back to Mick, trying to gauge his response, but Mick just stares into the middle distance. There’s an anger in his face that makes Ray want to shrink away from him the way he does everything else.

“I’ll leave you to think about your options,” the man says, smirks, utterly confident. He whisks away, and his men follow more slowly, drawing back from Mick like he’s a wild animal, like he’ll go for them at any second. He doesn’t. Doesn’t even climb to his feet.

The key turns in the lock, and Ray lies where he was dropped, trying to remember how to stand.

* * *

It has been less than a day, but Ray somehow looks worse than he had the first time Mick had rescued him. He's mottled with fresh bruises, new streaks of blood across them like some macabre piece of fine art, the clean clothes Mick had given him as ruined as his last lot, and he's still trying to get to his feet, wobbling like a baby deer.

Mick wants to go to him. To hold him, to help him, but what Ray had said to the man in charge had stung like broken glass, even if it had just been some misguided attempt to protect him, to spare him the same kind of beating they’d given Ray. He knows it hadn’t been meant, knows that their captor knows too, but still the thought of hearing something similar freezes him in place.

It was supposed to have gone right, this time. Mick had been about to do everything right, rescue Ray properly, apologise, get him to a hospital, burn everything they left behind. He’d been sitting and waiting and picking them off when they went for takeout, but all those slow minutes trickling into hours, when every second was too long, had worn at him. He’d tried to go in too soon, and there had been too many of them.

Across the room, Ray finally manages to drag himself up. He takes a few limping steps towards Mick, his jaw set and his injured arm pointing accusingly at him, the splints on his fingers broken.

“Why did you come back?” he demands, wavers with the force of it. “You got away, you should have just kept going.”

“Couldn’t leave you,” Mick says. He stands, slowly. His limbs ache as he stretches them, but there’s no permanent damage, and he angles himself towards the door, waiting for it to open again. “It’s my job.”

“It never was,” Ray says, turns away from Mick. He snatches at part of the machine with his good hand, dragging at the guts of it. “I remembered everything, Mick.”

Mick stops. Feels like he might fall, his head swimming with the words. He wants to say something, but he can’t find the words. Doesn’t understand why Ray doesn’t seem different, why he hasn’t come at him, hit him, told him everything he already knows himself. He looks at him, waiting to see if that’s what’s about to come, but Ray just keeps pulling at the machine. It’ll fall on him, Mick thinks, if he keeps at it like that.

“You shouldn’t have come back for me,” Ray says, and there’s more despair in it than anger. He wrenches at the wiring in his hand with every syllable. “I was going to be fine on my own.”

Mick snorts. It’s that that finally gets him moving again, striding over to the machine and steadying it with one hand, holding up against Ray’s yanks. They don’t need it clattering down around them, a rain of screws and metal edges.

“How?” he demands, and his fingers tighten against the machine until they ache. “He’s been using you as a punching bag.”

“They left me alone with this,” Ray tells him, and finally manages to detach whatever part of the machine he was after. He brandishes it Mick like it’s some sort of weapon, a gleam of silver in his hands, bright in the dim light. “If I hadn’t forgotten, I could have been out of there weeks ago. Never would have met you, though, so I guess it’s all right.”

“What?” Mick releases the machine in favour of grabbing a handful of Ray’s jacket at the shoulder, effectively stopping him in his tracks. Ray frowns at him like he can’t quite see him, confusion written over his features.

“I thought I’d already told you I like you?” he says, and there’s a hesitancy in it that tells Mick he’s remembering that attempt at a kiss. “Did I imagine that?”

“I betrayed you,” Mick reminds him, and Ray shakes his head so vehemently that he almost falls, would have fallen, if it weren’t for Mick’s hold.

“You didn’t,” Ray tells him, sounds more sure of it than Mick’s ever been of anything. “And you weren’t going to. Help me?” He gestures at the door with his component.

Mick half-carries him to it, Ray pressed so tightly against him that he can feel him shaking. He leans him against the wall, then moves back to the machine, trying to give him space.

“From my perspective,” Ray says, but he looks at the door, not at Mick, examining the lock with that complete focus that said his head was elsewhere. “You rescued me, took me somewhere safe, then risked your life trying to rescue me _again_. You’re proof of what you told me. People can change.”

“You don’t seem to have,” Mick says. He extracts a length of pipe from the machine, tests the weight of it in his hand, watches the gleaming along its length. He glances over at Ray, and sets it down again. He’ll need both hands to carry him. _I’m glad you didn’t change_ , he thinks, and he hopes that Ray knows it.

Ray offers him a brief, sickly smile, and then he goes back to poking whatever his bit of metal is into the lock.

“What is that, anyway?” Mick asks, tips his head towards the scavenged remnants of the machine.

“That’s a disaster,” Ray says, almost sounds like he’s about to laugh. “Connections don’t make sense. It’s like I was trying to build half of a lot of things. If you put an LED in it it’ll light up, but that’s really just-” he cuts himself off. “They wanted a tamper-proof bomb. It was never going to be that.”

“Decided you’re a good person?”

“Seem to be the sort who tries,” Ray says, and pushes himself along the wall, away from the door. “That’s going to-”

The door explodes outwards in a flash of light and noise, and Mick resists the impulse to take a step back. There’s a startled cry from the other side, a heavy thunk as it knocks hard into someone. Mick bares his teeth in the sort of smile that it’s been too long since he’s used, and then he’s running, pulling Ray with him, hauling him up across his shoulders when he starts to fall behind.

Mick remembers very little of the rush to the van, once it’s over. He’s sure they won’t make it, but their only alternative is not trying. He knows the building, but it’s not much of an advantage against the guns. They must have been fast, he thinks, fear and anger working like gasoline in his blood, or the thieves were slow to react to a threat they had already assumed neutralised.

It doesn’t matter. What matters is loading Ray into the passenger seat, ignoring his stuttered assurances that he can manage, when he’s barely conscious. What matters is the jolt of motion as the van starts. What matters is passing Ray his phone six blocks later and telling him to phone the police.

* * *

Mick pulls the van over at the edge of the road, and climbs out. Ray stares after him, his awareness sliding in and out. Mick is a diminishing shape in the darkness. He thinks he calls after him. Mick doesn’t stop. Ray is in no state to go after him.

* * *

When Ray wakes again, it’s to a swirling of blue lights strobing across his vision, Mick’s gone. They leave odd patterns over his retina, and he watches them. Can’t quite look away, even when the people in uniforms are loading him into the ambulance, and they keep asking him, _where is Mick Rory_ , and he doesn’t answer.

* * *

Mick doesn’t come to the hospital. The two CCPD officers they’ve left outside Ray’s room tell him that Mick’s a criminal, tell him everything he’s done, show him the outstanding warrants, and Ray nods and says that if he sees him again, he’ll phone. He’s lying. He’s getting better at that, he thinks. Eventually, they stop asking.

* * *

A man and a woman visit from the company he apparently owns. They make concerned noises, and he signs some pieces of paper, and they go away.

* * *

The hospital discharges him with his arm in a sling and butterfly stitches in his hair. A detective from the CCPD drives him home, tells him that almost everyone involved in the bomb threat has been taken into custody, that they had started turning up at the station, ready and willing to confess to everything, only hours after Ray had been found.

* * *

The day after his police protection detail finally decides Ray’s safe enough for them to leave, Mick turns up on his doorstep, jacket drenched from the rain that’s coursing in rivulets down his face, soaking into the collar of his shirt.

Ray stands aside to let him in without a word, and Mick passes him in silence. Goes no further than the hallway, stands there dripping until Ray’s closed and locked the door behind him. He doesn’t look quite right there, some sort of phantom of a different life. Ray wants to reach for him, prove to himself that he’s solid. He doesn’t. Goes as close as he dares, and waits for Mick to speak.

“Thought you should know,” he says, busies himself removing his gloves. “It’s all sorted now. They’re done.”

Something in Ray’s chest that’s been knotted ever since his abduction smooths out at the sound of his voice.

“All of them?” he asks, and Mick looks up at him, sharp, meets his eyes, knows what he’s asking.

“All of them,” Mick confirms, and then he’s moving, squeezing past Ray to hang his gloves on the coat rack. The house, which Ray had always thought was too large for just him, suddenly feels embarrassingly cramped. “And you should fire your bodyguards.”

“I don’t actually have any, not counting you,” Ray tells him. The other heads of PalmerTech had seemed keen on the idea of appointing one, and all their candidates had been so laughably in keeping with his mental picture of a bodyguard that he could hardly believe he’d ever accepted Mick’s story. “And I really don’t think I can officially employ you, what with the police-”

“You all right with it?” Mick leans into the wall across from him, considers Ray like he’s not really interested in the answer, but his shoulders have taken on that tension again.

“With what?”

“I’ve killed a lot of people,” Mick reminds him, 

“Oh. Yeah. You have.” The CCPD had been sure to show him every detail of Mick’s criminal history that they were aware of, but Ray hadn’t known how to help them, and wouldn’t have if he could. “But you saved my life. And you deserve the chance to change, to keep getting better.”

“I’m doing it for selfish reasons,” Mick tells him, pushes off the wall, leaving a small puddle of rainwater underneath where he’s been standing.

“No one’s perfect,” Ray says, offers Mick a half-smile that quirks on his face trying to break into something more.

Mick snorts, derisive, and then he kisses him, before either of them can find any more words to say. This time, neither of them pulls back. There’s no cloud of terror in Ray’s head, nothing desperate about the press of Mick’s mouth against his. They have all the time that they need, and still when the kiss breaks, it hasn’t been long enough. They’re both out of breath, and Ray stands there, senselessly committing every detail of it to memory. It’s not something that he can bear the idea of forgetting.


End file.
